Pro*C++: Useless when working with multithreaded C++ applications?

I started coding my server written in C++ on Microsoft Windows platform using Pro*C++ embedded sql because I was told that it is very easy to code interface for accessing Oracle data. And now I'm repenting I did that. I think, I'll need to recode everything using OCI after almost 2 months of efforts. It's extremely frustrating to work with Pro*C++. I will not advice anybody to use Pro*C++ with multithreading unless of course somebody already knows answers to the problems I'm facing. Here are some problems I am facing at the moment.

1. First and the biggest problem is it does not understand C++ program structure at all. If you want to write C++ programs you need to add code=cpp as preprocessor option. As soon as you do that the default option parse=partial has to be added. If you do that you preprocessor does not understand variables defined outside EXEC SQL DECLARATION SECTION BEGIN and END statements. That means that I cannot include private variables of the class used as host variables. (Cool!)
2. Then Pro*C++ preprocessor after preprocessing creates lots of global variables in the file. So we need to put all the EXEC SQL statements only in one .cpp file. Because otherwise we get compilation errors saying that same global variables are defined at multiple places.
3. Since every host variable needs to be defined between EXEC SQL DECLARATION SECTION BEGIN and END statements you cannot even pass host variables as arguments to the functions.
4. Sometimes there are ugly work arounds possible. But that makes your code look really really ugly. To give an example, since you cannot define a argument variable to be used as a host variable you can pass in a variable and then copy it into a variable defined between EXEC SQL DECLARATION SECTION BEGIN and END. Or since you cannot define a private class variable as an host variable, define a local variable in EXEC SQL DECLARATION SECTION BEGIN and END in EACH method and copy the private variable into it.
5. Most of the example programs given in Oracle documentation are written using C and NOT C++. So they do not address all the problems mentioned above at all. Hence the documentation is pretty much useless in many cases.
6. It's extremely difficult to get any help for the problems. I tried to post messages in newsgroups. No answers. Many times people just ask me to contact Oracle customer support. If I search in Oracle metalinks database, many of the problems are reported as bugs. And if they are not, then there are really ugly work arounds available which may not even be practical to do (For the problem I was facing it was suggested that declaration of cursor, opening of cursor and fetching should be done in one function or method! What if I cannot do that?!!!).
7. When I contacted Oracle customer support, all they keep saying is upgrade to the next version. In our case, we have about 500 customer sites. If we want to upgrade all of these sites its quite a project in itself!

Pro*C++ is the first Oracle product I started using and I must say I'm not impressed with it. I'm writing this post hoping that somebody still has answers to all these questions otherwise they know what kind of problems will they be facing using Pro*C++. I wish I had seen an article like this before I stared.

Atul Received on Wed Oct 31 2001 - 19:45:37 CET